Abstract

The purpose of this lecture is to describe recent efforts to determine how much of the knowledge gained from animal viral oncology is applicable to the etiology and pathogenesis of human cancer. I shall present evidence for the existence in human neoplasias of RNA molecules related in sequence to those found in RNA tumor viruses known to cause corresponding cancers in experimental animals. The diseases studied include human breast cancer, leukemias, lymphomas, and sarcomas. Further experiments showed that the RNA molecules identified in these human neoplasias are viral in size and are associated in a particle with "reverse transcriptase," an